28 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 22, 2014
Galleries---Chelsea
Siah Armajani
The Iranian sculptor is best known for
public works in outdoor spaces that
ri on the vernacular architecture o
America's heartland, notably bridges.
Now in his seventies, Armajani shifts
to a subject that is both public and
eternally private: a series o tombs,
dedicated (mostly) to writers. The
exhibition o drawings, models,
and freestanding sculptures su ers
from overcrowding, but each piece is
deeply felt and formally deft, from
a tabletop array for John Berryman,
which ful ills the poet's unrealized
dream o being interred beneath a
busy street in Minneapolis, where
Armajani has lived since 1960, to
a monument for Walt Whitman,
graced by a black canvas tent. In the
most powerful piece, subtitled "The
Last Tomb," the artist memorializes
his own life bridging two cultures.
The Constructivist-looking draw-
ing, more than eighteen feet long,
maps out his adopted home town
by marrying architectonic lines
and the curving ornament o Farsi
calligraphy. Whitman wrote o "an
end that lightly and joyfully meets
its translation"---Armajani achieves as
much here. Through Oct. 18. (Gray,
508 W. 26th St. 212-399-2636.)
John Divola
The eight large photographs from 1990
that make up the bulk o this smart
show are pictures o hastily painted,
black-on-black abstractions that served
as backdrops for brie performances,
in which Divola tossed handfuls o
lour and recorded the atmospheric
results. Fog rolls in, clouds drift by,
smoke erupts, a nebula explodes.
Conjuring weather and cosmic
events from the simplest materials,
the California artist combines ac-
tion, painting, and photography in
surprisingly seductive ways. Through
Oct. 25. (Wallspace, 619 W. 27th St.
212-594-9478.)
Paul Graham
In his most unabashedly romantic
exhibition so far, the British-born,
New York-based photographer ills the
gallery with pictures o rainbows arcing
across bucolic landscapes. Any gold at
the end o these rainbows probably
ended up in the urban pawnshops that
appear in several gritty streetscapes, also
on view. But Graham inds treasure
elsewhere: scattered throughout the
show are pictures o his girlfriend
asleep in several di erent beds. For-
mally rigorous, incredibly tender, and
simply beautiful, these works avoid
pitfalls o sentimentality, and instead
put the focus on love. Through Oct. 4.
(Pace, 510 W. 25th St. 212-255-4044.)
Justine Kurland
A photographer who started out as
a fantasist---staging scenes o young
girls escaping together into idyllic
landscapes---has turned into one o
our most talented realists. Kurland
remains a storyteller, and her new work
combines engaged photojournalism with
a sure feel for its narrative possibilities.
Her latest pictures, o wrecked cars,
auto-repair shops, and mechanics, re lect
her recent years on the American road,
usually in the company o her son,
who shows up here as the youngest
member in a cast o rough-and-ready
guys. Kurland's take on masculinity is
an ideal balance o appreciation and
critique. With no women in sight,
the automobile becomes the focus o
all erotic attention. Through Oct. 11.
(Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 W. 26th
St. 212-744-7400.)
3
Galleries---Downtown
Ernest Cole: Photographer
One o South Africa's irst black pho-
tojournalists, Cole risked imprisonment
with a hidden camera to expose the
everyday humiliations o life under
apartheid. His career was brief; all
the pictures in this retrospective were
taken in the nineteen-sixties, when Cole
was in his twenties. Many o them
didn't appear in print until after he
led South Africa, in 1966, following
an arrest. (He was homeless when he
died, in New York, o cancer, in 1990.)
Although his 1967 book, "House o
Bondage," was immediately banned in
his homeland, smuggled copies made
Cole a hero there, and no wonder. His
work is a painfully intimate view o a
system that dictated where and how
blacks could live, work, learn, sit,
stand, and gather. One o the show's
most extensive series documents the
hiring and housing o miners, including
Cole's most famous image, o a group
o naked men lined up facing a wall
in a doctor's o ice, their arms raised
as i in total surrender. Little is left
to the imagination here; whether he's
in the townships, on the streets o
Johannesburg, or on an overcrowded,
blacks-only train platform, Cole is
a fearless and relentless witness.
Through Dec. 6. (Grey Art Gallery,
100 Washington Sq. E. 212-998-6780.)
RT
Museums Short List
Metropolitan Museum
"Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn
of the Classical Age."
Opens Sept. 22.
Museum of Modern Art
"A Collection of Ideas."
Through Jan. 11.
Guggenheim Museum
"Under the Same Sun: Art from
Latin America Today."
Through Oct. 1.
Whitney Museum
"Jeff Koons: A Retrospective."
Through Oct. 19.
Brooklyn Museum
"Killer Heels: The Art of the
High-Heeled Shoe."
Through Feb. 15.
American Museum of
Natural History
"Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of
Dinosaurs." Through Jan. 4.
If you missed the smashing survey of the Korean video-art pioneer Nam June Paik at the Smithsonian, in 2013, a
consolation prize has arrived at the Asia Society: the less trenchant but still fascinating "Becoming Robot."
NAM JUNE PAIK "TRANSISTOR TELEVISION"